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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

I'm getting very nervous about manned propulsive landings. I know it's been done before, e.g. the LEM, but that at least had an abort option available and the flip manoeuvre seems to introduce a lot of unpredictability into the process. I wouldn't be surprised if they take up a Crew Dragon with them in a cargo bay to bring the crew back down separately for the first manned flights, until they've demonstrated a strong track record of successful propulsive landings.

As for Lunar Starship, it's massively overengineered for the Artemis requirements, capable of taking 100 tons to the Lunar surface. That's great for later missions to set up a base, but even then you'd likely need a crew version just for shuttling people back and forth. So I wouldn't be surprised to see the first version of that to be somewhat scaled down from the concept art. That should massively reduce the number of refuelling missions needed for the early Artemis flights.

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> I'm getting very nervous about manned propulsive landings.

Humans will land on earth in Orion capsule not Starship. So there will only be a tanker that has to do the flip.

On the moon, there is no flip.

The Appollo didn't have a abort option is parts of the flight, unless I am misinformed.

> So I wouldn't be surprised to see the first version of that to be somewhat scaled down from the concept art.

The problem is then about how you do the integration. All the tooling and processes are designed for one size of Starship, to change the whole design just to make it smaller is unlikely to be an efficient thing to do.

Instead they could just fly part of it empty and take far less then the full 100t to the moon, rather then design a smaller version.

If a LEM landing became untenable they could abort to Lunar orbit by launching the crew capsule. You know how after landing on the moon the way they got back to Lunar orbit was by launching the crew capsule, using the lower stage of the LEM as a launch platform? They could actually do that in flight. You're right of course though, I forgot that for Artemis they wont be landing people on Earth in Starship.

All they need to do to make a lighter Lunar starship is make it shorter. Just miss out some fuel tank and payload section segments. No need to make significant changes to the functional parts, it would just be stubbier.

I didn't know they could actually do the accent in flight. Do you have a source about that? Apollo is seriously insane, they thought of everything and pulled it off.

Check out the Apollo 10 mission; they in fact did that as a rehearsal for the landing.

>100 tons to the Lunar surface

the next morning after the first such delivery would feel like a new era because with Starships it will be just like a regular shipping line, less than $1B per 100ton cargo to the Moon taking just several days. The Moon will become more reachable than Philippines were at the time of Manilla Galleons (which would be more like the Mars flights).

I agree, Crew Dragon (and maybe Orion and Boeing Starliner) are going to be the people-carriers of choice for Earth launch and re-entry for at least the next decade.

I don't really have concerns about launching people on Starship, it's the landing process that gives me the willies.

I think people are really vastly underestimating how fast things are moving. I think you're completely wrong and Crew Dragon will be relegated to only fulling a remaining portion of a NASA contract after less than 5 years. Everyone else (private astronauts) will fly on Starship.

Yeah, I really can't help but wonder if SpaceX is going to go after the long distance travel market. Starship can do suborbital hops without Superheavy.

Only comparatively short ones, with limited payload. Getting to a ballistic trajectory from one side of the planet to the other takes almost as much dV as going to orbit.

A decade is a very long time. A decade ago, SpaceX only had 4 successful launches.

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